The Living Landscape: Moonstruck
- Kathleen Scavone
- Posted On
“We all shine on...like the moon and the stars and the sun...we all shine on...come on and on and on...” – John Lennon
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The recent supermoon over Lake County's skies was a stunning and amazing sight to behold.
The skies here in Lake County are crystalline and perfect for gazing upon heavenly bodies.
Just what is a supermoon? According to Wikipedia:
"A supermoon is a full moon or a new moon that approximately coincides with the closest distance that the Moon reaches to Earth in its elliptic orbit, resulting in a larger-than-usual apparent size of the lunar disk as seen from Earth."
The next supermoon which will coincide with perigee, or the closest the moon comes to earth during its orbit, will occur during the new year, on Jan. 2 and 31, with the Jan. 2 supermoon slated as the most super, closest and largest, according to EarhtSky's Web site.
The colossal-appearing moon received the moniker, “supermoon” around 30 years ago when an astrologer named Richard Noelle – yes, an astrologer, rather than an astronomer coined the term!
The appearance of a supermoon, or full moon, over time has been falsely attributed to disasters such as tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, but contrary to popular belief, experts delineate that no hard evidence can prove the correlations.
Folklore holds that a full moon causes all manner of weird goings-on, such as a higher crime rate and “lunacy” such as howling. Experts who study lunar rhythm and its relationship to human behavior do find evidence to support a full moon's effect on some people.
But the findings are not consistent. Some studies show that a full moon affects sleep patterns in adults, but not in children. According to Time Magazine, "Even if the moon has as significant an effect on sleep as studies suggest, what's less clear is the mechanism behind it."
The full moon has most certainly been romanticized and applied to the titles of movies, such as the 1902 silent film, "A Trip to the Moon", the 1929 science fiction silent film, "Woman in the Moon," "Paper Moon", and more. Poetry abounds with moon as its subject, such as Emily Dickinson's "I watched the Moon Around the House," Ted Hughes's poem "Full Moon and Little Frieda” and Henry David Thoreau's "The Moon," to name but a few. Who doesn't know a song or two that features our own satellite, the moon? Songs such as "Moon River," "Bad Moon Rising," "Dancing in the Moonlight" and "Moondance" may come to mind.
For more photos of the recent supermoon visit https://www.space.com/38973-supermoon-2017-photos-by-stargazers.html.
Kathleen Scavone, M.A., is a retired educator, potter, writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora, and Fauna Tour of a California State Park” and “Native Americans of Lake County.” She also formerly wrote for NASA and JPL as one of their “Solar System Ambassadors.” She was selected “Lake County Teacher of the Year, 1998-99” by the Lake County Office of Education, and chosen as one of 10 state finalists the same year by the California Department of Education.